| Abstract |
On August 14, 2003, large portions of the Midwest and Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected an area with an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts (MW) of electric load in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey and the Canadian province of Ontario. The blackout began a few minutes after 4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time (16:00 EDT), and power was not restored for 2 days in some parts of the United States. Parts of Ontario suffered rolling blackouts for more than a week before full power was restored. On August 15, President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Jean Chretien directed that a joint U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force be established to investigate the causes of the blackout and how to reduce the possibility of future outages. |
